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Capital Punishment : The Death Penalty

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Capital Punishment in America The death penalty dates back centuries. The death penalty is a lawful infliction of death as a punishment for the commission of a particular crime in the United States. Capital punishment is used in the United States as a deterrent to serious crimes. A sentence to death may be carried out depending on each state by lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging, or firing squad but all states have lethal injection as their primary method. There has been a big debate over capital punishment for years on whether it is justifiable, “an eye for an eye” or cruel and unusual punishment “two wrongs do not make a right.”
History
Centuries ago, records state that capital punishment had brutal execution methods and it was justified. Some methods included: being buried alive, crucified, hanged, shot, impaled, stoned, boiled in oil, burned, pressed to death, smothered, stretched on a rack, and thrown to wild animals. European settlers brought the practice of capital punishment to America dating back to the year 1608. The first recorded execution in the states happened to Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608 and was executed for being a spy for Spain (R. Bohm, 1999). The reason colonists participated in capital punishment because it was the way for them to punish colonists by death and understand treason was a capital offense. Over time, the states came up with more ways of executions for their capital offenses and

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